Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The Trouble with High Self Esteem

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.

We are used to hearing about the negative effects of low self esteem. It is the thing that holds us back and interferes with our ability to successfully carry out Freud’s two criteria for a fulfilled life: to love and work.
Most psychotherapists will be familiar with it in the consulting room because both men and women suffer from it, each in their own way.
It makes the ordinary business of life more difficulty, it hampers relationships by making them uneven, it turns the effort of putting oneself forward into an insurmountable obstacle, it makes people feel they deserve it when bad things happen to them, and it makes them blame themselves when things fail or mistakes happen.
And yet we rarely year of the damage caused by high self esteem. It too can be damaging, not only to the person generating it but also to those around him or her. It is, however, a difficult thing to recognize because it is wrapped up in so many attributes that we consider positive.
How can you determine if someone who succeeds is genuinely talented or being propelled by negative high self esteem? I was reminded of this reading award-winning financial journalist Kathleen Barrington's new blog on the rise of Irish property millionaires, who risked everything in pursuit of extreme wealth. Her point is that they became the same type of landlords that the British had been when they governed Ireland, consumed with the acquisition of wealth, power and status. She paints a picture of ambition without any sense of proportion.
And so the short answer is it is impossible to tell if someone has a genuine talent for success of whether they are recklessly driven by less admirable qualities such as vanity, greed and this same lust for status and power. At least it is on the upward trajectory of the person’s career. The true test is when the trajectory falters and complications or obstacles or setbacks occur.
We have seen a great deal of wealth created in Ireland over the past 10 years or so. The country has improved enormously but at the top levels of Irish corporate life, particularly in the financial sector, we have seen the emergence of greed and dishonesty that has not been pretty to watch.
Of particular interest are those men, and it is mostly men at the top of the corporate system, who have driven their companies in pursuit of profit to such an extent that prudence and concern for shareholders', employees', suppliers' and customers' interests have taken a back seat.
Even before the recessions the examples were numerous of individuals who had taken decisions to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. It's just that in recession those decisions become less admirable. Were those men driven by a conviction of their infallibility and the correctness of their actions? The reasonable answer would be yes they were.
And they would have made their way up the career ladder displaying the same characteristics of single mindedness, a strong belief in their own decisions and a canny knack in making others believe in it too. This can be a good thing if it is part of a well rounded personality that understands limits, fairness, boundaries and the place of others. Enmeshed in this corporate culture is a notion that risk taking comes with the territory, that fortune favours the brave and that the higher the salary and pension you can squeeze out of your organization the better the businessman you must be.
Despite the narcissistic machismo inherent in all this, there can be some good in it. Or rather, had the world economy continued on its merry path, everything would indeed have been well and good.
But things took a turn for the worse. Jobs have been lost, companies have collapsed and economies have gone into a tailspin. In this light, the actions by some of our leading business people to continue their pursuit of power and wealth despite the changing conditions reveals the more damaging side of high self esteem. The over-arching belief that what you are doing is right, despite the objections of others or the moral climate of the time or the economic conditions that prevail, is a clear sign that negative high self esteem is operating. The thing that was unnoticed and often praised when times were good, is now a curiously misplaced strategy when times are bad.
You’ll often hear it said that these people are out of touch with reality, paying themselves hugely despite the reality of the market place right now. But it is just as likely that these people are not out of touch with reality, that they do know the inappropriateness of what they are doing but that their narcissistic compulsion to act in their own self interest is simply too strong for them to overcome. It is an embedded part of who they are, and one that up to now served them well. To continue defending against perceiving themselves negatively – because inappropriate high self esteem cannot allow this – they act in a way that the rest of us can detect, even at an intuitive level, as being out-of-kilter.
We must also remember that a system is in place that actively allows people with this mind-set to scale the heights of success. Concern, sensitivity, modesty, regard for others, a sense of one’s own fallibility and limitations, these are not the qualities we look for in our business leaders. Once they reach the top, they are more than likely surrounded by people of a similar mindset that prop them up in their self-belief. Isn’t it interesting how few organizations have apologized to employees, shareholders or customers who have suffered because of corporate greed and recklessness? Public apologies are simply a rarity in our corporate culture.

But it is by no means confined to the business world. You will find the damaging effects of high self esteem just as easily in interpersonal relationships as you will in organizational culture. Once established, it is a particularly difficult and insidious influence to weed out. The only chance of dealing with it successfully is to evaluate frankly and honestly the impact of a person’s high self esteem on those around them. Confidence is one thing, but confidence at the expense of either a partner’s or an organisation’s well-being is a signal that things are not as they should be and should be changed.

1 comment:

Kathleen said...

Hey Kevin, that's a most thought-provoking piece. Maybe a few NNWIs will sign up for therapy on the foot of it! Kathleen